Microsoft Outage Still Ongoing: Xbox Live Affected Friday Morning

Microsoft’s global service outage is still running on Friday, November 13, 2026. Microsoft says recovery is “progressing in phases,” and Xbox players report trouble signing in, launching games and reaching cloud saves.

Microsoft 365 Status, the official Microsoft account for service updates, posted news at 10:28 UTC (4:28 a.m. CT): recovery work is under way, several services are getting better, but overall health “remains variable” and capacity has not yet returned to its normal level. Microsoft has also stretched the email timeout window to 48 hours to protect mail stuck in the queue, and it says there is “no evidence of malicious activity” behind the problem. An earlier post from the same account on November 12 blamed “elevated load across multiple regions” for the connection errors.

Xbox’s own status page still shows green, but players report problems such as being unable to sign in, launch digital games, use cloud saves or reach Xbox Cloud Gaming, as Windows Central reported on Friday. That outlet’s staff could still reach Xbox services, so the console side of this outage is patchier than the email and Teams side.

Xbox Cloud Gaming means Microsoft runs the game on its own servers and streams it to your console, and that is how Grand Theft Auto VI is due to arrive on November 19. Microsoft has not posted an all-clear yet, so anyone planning to play that day should work through our GTA 6 pre-launch checklist.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report